Language and Linguistics > Language Study

Gagana Samoa is a modern Samoan language resource. Designed for both classroom and personal use, it features a methodical approach suitable for all ages; an emphasis on patterns of speech and communication through practice and examples; 10 practical dialogues covering everyday social situations; an introduction to the wider culture of fa‘asamoa through photographs; more than 150 exercises to reinforce comprehension; a glossary of all Samoan words used in the coursebook; oral skills supplemented with audio files available on a separate CD or for download or streaming on the web.

Second language students not only need strategies for drafting and revising to write effectively, but also a clear understanding of genre so that they can appropriately structure their writing for various contexts. Over that last decade, increasing attention has been paid to the notion of genre and its central place in language teaching and learning. Genre and Second Language Writing enters into this important debate, providing an accessible introduction to current theory and research in the area of written genres-and applying these understandings to the practical concerns of today's EFL/ESL classroom. Each chapter includes discussion and review questions and small-scale practical research activities. Like the other texts in the popular Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers, this book will interest ESL teachers in training, teacher educators, current ESL instructors, and researchers and scholars in the area of ESL writing.

"The Germanic Languages" may easily be read by scholars with limited knowledge of Germanic philology. It provides a solid introduction to the debate generated by attempts at classification. In addition, it contains an extensive bibliography of related works and pays considerable attention to necessary background information."--Language

In these short, bilingual stories set in Buenos Aires (with each piece appearing in Spanish and English on facing pages), Alicia Borinsky provides unique glimpses into the lives of the city's inhabitants: its businessmen and tango dancers, politicians and torturers, triumphant divas and discarded children—a gallery of characters from a broad spectrum of contemporary Argentine society. She portrays a world of violence, corruption, love, and betrayal. The brevity of the pieces suggests a breathlessness and ephemeral quality, the fast-paced rhythm of the present. Yet within these small moments flicker the larger forces that shape ordinary lives. Civil wars are fought, shady deals are made, unwanted children are born. And in Borinsky's ironic but life-affirming prose, human foibles are exposed.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Taken from the surviving contemporary documentary sources, Julian Granberry's volume describes the grammar and lexicon for the extinct 17th-century Timucua language of Central and North Florida and traces the origins of the 17th-century Timucua speakers and their language. Originally privately published in 1987, with limited circulation, this is the only available publication on the Timucuan language. It provides full grammatical analysis and complete lexical data, and it synthesizes both linguistic and archaeological data in order to provide a coherent picture of the Timucua peoples. Granberry traces the probable historical origins of Timucua speakers to a central Amazonian homeland at approximately 2,500 B.C. and proposes that Timucua speakers were responsible for introducing ceramic wares into North America.

This book presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of PortVila. It is one of the first such grammars to take seriously the provision of primary data for the verification of claims made in the analysis. The research is set in the context of increasing attention being paid to the state of the world’s smaller languages and their prospects for being spoken into the future. In addition to providing an outline of the grammar of the language, the author describes the process of developing an archivable textual corpus that is used to make example sentences citable and playable, using software (Audiamus) developed in the course of the research. An included DVD provides a dictionary and finderlist, a set of interlinearized example texts and elicited sentences, and playable media versions of most example sentences and of the example texts.

Phags-pa Chinese is the earliest form of the Chinese language to be written in a systematically devised alphabetic script. It is named after its creator, a brilliant thirteenth-century Tibetan scholar-monk who also served as political adviser to Kublai Khan. 'Phags-pa's invention of an alphabet for the Mongolian language remains an extraordinarily important accomplishment, both conceptually and practically. With it he achieved nothing less than the creation of a unified script for all of the numerous peoples in the Mongolian empire, including the Central Asian Turks and Sinitic-speaking Chinese.
'Phags-pa is of immense importance for the study of premodern Chinese phonology. However, the script is difficult to read and interpret, and secondary materials on it are scattered and not easily obtained. The present book is intended as a practical introduction to 'Phags-pa Chinese studies and a guide for reading and interpreting the script. It consists of two parts. The first part is an introductory section comprising four chapters. This is followed by a glossary of 'Phags-pa Chinese forms and their corresponding Chinese characters, together with pinyin and stroke order indexes to those characters.The first introductory chapter outlines the invention of the 'Phags-pa writing system, summarizes the major types of material preserved in it, and describes the historical and linguistic contexts in which this invention occurred. Following chapters detail the history of 'Phags-pa studies, the alphabet and its interpretation, and the salient features of the underlying sound system represented by the script, comparing it with those of various later forms of Chinese that have been recorded in alphabetic sources.
A Handbook of 'Phags-pa Chinese will be of special interest to Chinese historical phonologists and scholars concerned with the history and culture of China and Central Asia during the Yuan period (A.D. 1279–1368).

The story of how American Sign Language (ASL) came to be is almost mythic. In the early 19th century, a hearing American reverend, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, met a Deaf French educator, Laurent Clerc, who agreed to come to the United States and help establish the first school in America to use sign language to teach deaf children. The trail of ASL’s development meanders at this point. No documentation of early ASL was published until the late 19th century, almost seven decades after the school’s founding. While there are many missing pieces in the history of America’s sign language, plenty of data exist regarding ASL etymology. This book is the first to collect all known texts featuring illustrations of early ASL and historical images of French Sign Language―langue des signes française (LSF)―and link them with contemporary signs.
Through rigorous study of historical texts, field research in communities throughout France and the U.S., and in-depth analysis of the cultural groups responsible for the lexicon, authors Emily Shaw and Yves Delaporte present a compelling and detailed account of the origins of over 500 ASL signs, including regional variations. Organized alphabetically by equivalent English glosses, each sign is accompanied by a succinct description of its origin and an LSF sign where appropriate. Featuring an introductory chapter on the history of the development of ASL and the etymological methodology used by the authors, this reference resource breaks new ground in the study of America’s sign language.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning cultural pride of white Creoles in New Orleans intersected with America's golden age of print, to explosive effect. Imagining the Creole City reveals the profusion of literary out-put-histories and novels, poetry and plays-that white Creoles used to imagine themselves as a unified community of writers and readers.
Rien Fertel argues that Charles Gayarré's English-language histories of Louisiana, which emphasized the state's dual connection to America and to France, provided the foundation of a white Creole print culture predicated on Louisiana's exceptionalism. The writings of authors like Grace King, Adrien Rouquette, and Alfred Mercier consciously fostered an image of Louisiana as a particular social space, and of themselves as the true inheritors of its history and culture. In turn, the forging of this white Creole identity created a close-knit community of cosmopolitan Creole elites, who reviewed each other's books, attended the same salons, crusaded against the popular fiction of George Washington Cable, and worked together to preserve the French language in local and state governmental institutions. Together they reimagined the definition of "Creole" and used it as a marker of status and power.
By the end of this group's era of cultural prominence, Creole exceptionalism had become a cornerstone in the myth of Louisiana in general and of New Orleans in particular. In defining themselves, the authors in the white Creole print community also fashioned a literary identity that resonates even today.

Deaf Americans have identified healthcare as the most difficult setting in which to obtain a qualified interpreter. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to developing evidence-based resources and a standardized body of knowledge to educate healthcare interpreters. In Our Hands: Educating Healthcare Interpreters addresses these concerns by delineating the best practices for preparing interpreters to facilitate full access for deaf people in healthcare settings.
The first section of this volume begins with developing domains and competencies toward a teaching methodology for medical and mental health interpreters. The next chapter describes a discourse approach that relies on analyzing actual transcripts and recordings to train healthcare interpreters. Other chapters feature a model mental health interpreter training program in Alabama, using a Demand-Control Schema for experiential learning, the risk of vicarious trauma to interpreters, online educational opportunities, and interpreting for deaf health care professionals. The second section offers four perspectives on education, including healthcare literacy of the clients; the education of Deaf interpreters; the development of standards for spoken-language healthcare interpreters; and the perspectives of healthcare interpreter educators in Europe. The range and depth of In Our Hands takes significant strides in presenting educational opportunities that can enhance the critical services provided by healthcare interpreters to deaf clients.

Welcome to Project MUSE

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